Feminist media manipulation

While Price was insisting there’s no evidence regarding tactical DV allegations, The Australian was reporting a live story that says otherwise - with journalist Ellie Dudley breaking scoop after scoop, and Janet Albrechtsen adding commentary.

Meet Roger Clisdell, a NSW Local Court judge with 18 years on the bench. Hearing a DV matter last year - a father trying to get access to his own children - Clisdell said out loud what family lawyers already know: tactical apprehended violence orders (AVOs) were “very common.” This case, he said, had “all the hallmarks of what’s alleged. They’ve separated, they’ve got shared custody and suddenly, she starts saying, ‘Oh, there’s coercive control and I want the children not to go near him.’”

Clisdell heard her evidence - where she admitted “I have no fears of physical harm” - before ruling there wasn’t enough to keep the father away. “These are always difficult situations,” the judge said. Referring to the couple’s earlier shared custody arrangement, he added: “I have got to somehow restore that at this stage because there is no physical threat to the children and though there is some concern about psychological harm, these (interim) orders are primarily designed to provide protection from violence.”

For that - for applying the evidence in front of him, carefully, and reaching a considered conclusion - Clisdell had a complaint upheld against him by the NSW Judicial Commission. We only know about that because a journalist went looking - by law, the Commission itself is gagged from ever telling us. And when the same AVO matter returned to court this year, police withdrew it entirely - whatever “evidence” existed hadn’t survived proper scrutiny.

Clisdell isn’t a one-off. He’s part of a wider pattern in the NSW legal system: judges being quietly punished not for getting the law wrong, but for suggesting that evidence should matter before someone’s life is upended.

The clearest example is unfolding right now, in a separate but related scandal involving NSW’s chief prosecutor, Sally Dowling. A NSW parliamentary committee has just handed down a 75-page report finding it was likely Dowling authorised leaking confidential information to a radio station - retaliation against District Court judge Penelope Wass, after Wass had publicly raised concerns about weak, evidence-light rape cases being pushed to trial. The committee found Dowling gave “false evidence” to the inquiry and “seriously obstructed” its work. Her response was to deny it all. The legal establishment’s response was to close ranks: prosecutors from every state signed a joint letter vouching for her “integrity,” while the Public Service Union insisted the committee’s findings weren’t “based upon any evidence” - a claim hard to square with, well, the 75-page report full of it.

Judge Wass wasn’t alone in raising the alarm, and she wasn’t alone in paying for it. District Court judge Robert Newlinds was pulled off criminal cases entirely after calling for an end to “lazy and perhaps politically expedient” referrals of weak rape cases to trial - told he could only return once a chief judge decided he’d completed enough re-education. Judge Peter Whitford, who’d raised the same concerns, faced the Judicial Commission’s wrath too.

None of this is about custody or access to children - that’s Clisdell’s territory, not theirs. But it’s the same underlying instinct on display: when a judge points out that an allegation hasn’t been backed by evidence - whether it’s a rape charge that shouldn’t have gone to trial, or an AVO used to keep a father from his kids - the system doesn’t examine the claim. It goes after the judge.

Which is exactly why Price can claim in her Herald article that there’s no evidence of tactical AVOs - because officially, there isn’t much. Not because they don’t happen, but because our authorities very deliberately choose not to fund the research that would prove it. The Clisdell saga shows precisely why: when a judge with 18 years’ experience says the quiet part out loud, the system’s response isn’t to investigate whether he’s right. It’s to secretly punish him for saying it and count on the silence that follows to keep the “no evidence” claim technically true.

Put it all together and a pattern emerges. It’s not that anyone picked up a phone and orchestrated any of this. Nobody needed to. When the people running our media newsrooms and the people running our legal institutions share the same feminist assumptions - that women don’t lie, that every allegation deserves belief, that scepticism itself is the real danger - they don’t need a conspiracy to arrive at the same destination. They just need to keep looking away from anything that complicates the story. And by that measure, they’re doing a remarkably good job.

Before I move on: I’m delighted to announce I’ll shortly be recording a video interview with Pauline Hanson on exactly this - her plans to reform the Family Court, and to tackle the domestic violence racket that now dominates our magistrates’ courts. Hanson has her own family experience with these issues and has spent decades listening to the stories of people caught up in them. If One Nation ends up holding real power after the next election, this will be high on her agenda.

Which brings me to Moira Deeming, a Victorian state MP whose courage I’ve long admired.